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These spectacles ran up against saloons and gambling houses, faro and opium, shelters for wayward girls, betting halls and drinking halls and sporting halls and social halls, a hall for every vice and veteran of war, Spanish and Civil, and unions, too, do-gooders and service clubbers, Salvation Army and Temperance League and merciful Souls of Mercy—cause and effect, disease and cure all swirled up in the loin, block after block of wretched glorious humanity wandering the east-end streets and alleys, hungry, thirsty, lonely beggars and bums and hands and sawyers and millers and miners and
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People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.
Seattle was like an infection that started at the water and spread up the verdant hills. The smell of stewed harbor turned his guts: salt flats, log pulp, and fish guts stirred by a tide that gently rocked the city’s sewage back and forth. Gig said it was why he preferred a river town, because it took your shit away. “A man shouldn’t have to worry about his morning business coming back for him in the afternoon.”
Rye stared at the wrinkled bill. A stray thought: If I spend this, I will no longer have it. This was the crazy thing about wealth: You only had it if you didn’t use it, but if you didn’t use it, there was no value in having it. It was like a riddle. No wonder some men died with more money than they could spend in a second life while other men starved. And him: a fool with twenty dollars and ice-cold hands.
An rud nach leigheasann im ná uisce beatha níl aon leigheas air. That was Da’s old adage: What cannot be cured by whiskey and butter cannot be cured. I used to believe it meant that butter and whiskey were the cures for everything, but I have come to realize that saying is about something else, about that which cannot be cured by whiskey or butter or anything in this world, namely, life. That steaming fly-covered shit pile of heartache, life.
Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.
At my age, you don’t cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, “Ah,” that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness—here is yet another person I will never see again.
Maybe it’s being close to the end, but I have this desire to pull Greg aside—to pull all my children aside, and my grandchildren—and to whisper something profound, to pass on the great wisdom I’ve acquired. Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity. But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience. And Bet on the last horse to piss. I
